With the new dashboard appearing on Xbox 360 consoles all over the world, Microsoft decided to hit us with a surprise. The official My Xbox LIVE app has hit for iphones, removing pretty much every reason any hardcore gamer could ever want a Windows Phone. What’s even more surprising is how robust and well fleshed out the free app is. Running on both iPhone and iPad, the app gives you all the data you could want, but leaves out a few little touches I’d have liked.

The official Xbox Live App (which can be found here), features an avatar editor, the ability to check your messages, watch video news and updates, and check your gamer score. But it’s lacking a few features that could have made it perfect.

While being able to check messages is nice, so many messages I get are voice messages. For some reason both this app and Xbox.com have yet to integrate any kind of way to listen to the messages away from your xbox. Why this hasn’t changed in the five years since the Xbox 360 launch is beyond me.

Another lacking feature is notifications. The app won’t signal you if you get a message. I use my iPhone to stay in touch and I like to reply as soon as I get any kind of message across my social networks. If the network doesn’t go out of its way to tell me I have a message then I usually never find it. This is why a lot of messages on Xbox Live get lost in the shuffle.

The avatar editor is robust and lets you edit your character using any item you’ve already purchased. There isn’t any marketplace integration yet, most likely due to how Apple wants transactions handled on their devices, but being able to quickly play around with your full animated avatar, change their outfit, spin them around and more is pretty cool.

One integration that I’d like to see added would be a bump like feature. Sharing your gamertag with another iPhone user though a quick bump (like the Bump app) or some kind of simple proximity based sharing system would be really fantastic. At events like PAX and E3 you’re constantly bombarded by new people who want to play you and this would give them a simple way to get your info.

Over all the app is great, and removes the need for any of those fake Xbox apps that have flooded the market place. There are so many of these apps in fact that it’s really hard to find the new one unless you search for MY XBOX LIVE. Without that you’re going to get every other xbox app under the sun before you get the official one, which is by far the best.